Compelling Stories: Jewish Lives Lived

Monday, November 2, 2015

"'The Pawnbroker's Daughter'" is not a posthumous volume of poems (though she draws from her work throughout), but a loose and lucid memoir that charts Kumin's path from middle-class Jewish kid in Philadelphia to a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet laureate, feminist icon, and, perhaps most significantly, flatlander turned New England farmer," from a review in the Boston Globe by Michael Andon Brodeur 7/18/2015

This memoir, consisting of five chapters about the life of the American poet Maxine Kumin, was published in 1915, shortly after her death. In it, this well-respected poet traces the arc of her life from young Jewish girl growing up in Germantown, Pennsylvania in the 1940’s to emerging poet in the 50’s and beyond. Only the first of the five chapters is new. The four others had been previously published in literary magazines.

It’s interesting that the memoir is called “The Pawnbroker’s Daughter” because only in the first of the five chapters does she talk about her family. Her father took over the successful pawn shop his father had started in Philadelphia, providing a good living for his family, but at the same time it created embarrassment for Kumin’s socially-striving mother. Kumin explains that her mother, the child of German Jewish immigrants who was raised in Radford, Virginia, felt that she had in fact married beneath her. Her husband’s background was Russian Jewish, his business was suspect. All of these attitudes and embarrassments filtered down to Kumin and she remembers distinctly her mother instructing her to use the vague word “broker” in saying what her father did for a living.

Kumin describes aspects of her Jewish upbringing – their membership in Temple Rodeph Shalom, a reform synagogue where she says the service felt close to being Unitarian. She also remarks on the Temple’s anti-Zionist stance, common in the early days of the Reform movement. She remembers her father heartbroken over letters he received from relatives stuck in Poland at the same time she and her family were living lives of privilege, striving to assimilate, to become indistinguishable from all other Americans. Hers was a Jewish childhood typical in many ways.

In all subsequent chapters Kumin’s Jewish identity is either left behind or falls away. In chapter 2, “Love in Wartime,” Kumin summarizes her years at Radcliffe College where she was immersed in a wider world than she had been exposed to at home. Victor Kumin, a graduate of Harvard who was in the army and was working at Los Alamos, entered her life and they embarked on a whirlwind courtship that culminated in a marriage that lasted more than sixty years

The other chapters in this slight but engrossing memoir are about Maxine Kumin as a poet and the world around her that fed her poetry. She writes about what it was like living in the suburbs – they lived in Newton, Massachusetts for many years – trying to raise her children and work on poetry. It’s an interesting story of feeling tentative as a woman in a field dominated by men, making her way, staying with it, juggling her responsibilities. As time marches on she receives well deserved recognition. She is taken seriously as a poet and becomes a teacher and mentor of others. The last chapters have most to do with the family’s moving permanently to a farm in New Hampshire where they living out their days raising horses and tending their gardens.

Is this a Jewish story? A case can certainly be made that many an American Jew assimilated into mainstream culture, leaving behind the vestiges of their Jewishness that their immigrant ancesters brought with them to this country. In Maxine Kumin’s case an argument can also be made that her “Jewish” legacy became part of her poetry. She frequently talks about “bearing witness” and the subject matter of many of her poetry confirms this. Perhaps this is a way to view her life as more “Jewish” than it appeared on the surface. She was the pawnbroker’s daughter.

To read a short biography of Maxine Kumin, which emphasizes her Jewish roots click here.

Family
Max WinokurJoseph Winokur – son of Max; married to BeaPete Winokur – son of MaxHerbert Winokur – son of PetePeter Winokur – son of PeteMaxine Winokur – son of Pete; married to Victor Kumin

Monday, October 5, 2015

"This poignant memoir is an education in the richness of eastern European cuisine, and the story of Soviet communism, through the lens of family experience," in a review by Mina Holland in The Guardian 9/15/2013

Anya von Bremzen, a food and travel writer, has written an engaging memoir about life in the Soviet Union. She focuses on food and typical dishes to tell the story of her family and Soviet life in the context of Soviet history. At the end of the memoir she includes a sampling of recipes, including a Georgian recipe for gefilte fish. .

Always aware that she was Jewish on her mother’s side, she realized that because of Soviet political policy, being Jewish was considered an ethnicity and not a religion. She was certainly aware of anti-semitism, but she grew up knowing nothing about the Jewish religion and realizes she knows little about her family’s history.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfj4-NO7VC8 Born in 1963 and immersed in life in Moscow, she goes backward in time to fill in the past. Each chapter focuses on a decade, starting with the first decade of the twentieth century. She narrates a lively history, describing various leaders, their regimes, and their destructive, ego-building pet projects, many involving disastrous farming practices like collectivization and land distribution. The repercussions led to rationing and starvation which led to long lines, hoarding and the attendant corruption in the marketplace. The party insiders lived in better apartments and ate well; those who had money offered bribes and had connections (blat).

The author uses her family to illustrate the impact policy had on ordinary Soviet citizens. She lived in an apartment building – von Bremzen says there’s no word in Russian for privacy – sharing a communal kitchen and a bathroom with a host of others all crammed into apartments with very little living space.

In 1974, as Jewish Soviets they were allowed to emigrate. She and her mother first went to Philadelphia, then Queens, NY where they became part of the immigrant, expatriate community. Still Russian to the core, they adapted to America. She became a student at Juilliard and her mother started out cleaning house but moved on teaching English As A Second Languare. But she points out how quickly nostalgia for aspects of Russian life set in, especially after her first visits to American supermarkets where she felt the quality of the food far inferior to what she ate in the Soviet Union – when that food was available.

The interplay of history, food policy, recipes and convivial meals described through the prism of the author’s family’s experience makes for fascinating reading. It illuminates Soviet history in vital ways and also reveals what Soviet immigrants left behind and the lives they built in America.

To listen to or to read a National Public Radio piece on the plight of Soviet Jews click here.
To watch a video of Anya von Bremzen talking about her memoir click here.

Monday, September 7, 2015

"'But the concept of . . .being happy’ — that was for modern people or movie stars. I.e., degenerates' Chast’s mother exclaims: 'Elizabeth Taylor! Seven husbands. Oy gevalt.'" Quotes from Chast's Can't we talk about something more PLEASANT? in a review by Alex Witchel in the New York Times 4/30/2014

Roz Chast, mostly known for her frequent cartoons in the New Yorker magazine, has written an award-winning graphic memoir whose subject is her aging parents. This memoir is a portrait of a family that looks back to Jewish immigration at the turn of the twentieth century and follows these immigrants' descendants as they move from tenements to suburbs, pursuing the American Dream.

Both parents were born in 1912 to Russian Jewish immigrants and met when they were children in East Harlem. They settled in an apartment off of Ocean Parkway in an area Chast describes as not at all contemporary trendy Brooklyn, but rather “deep” Brooklyn where they raised Roz, their only child.

A host of circumstances made Roz’s upbringing difficult: her parents were older when she was born, she was an only child. There had been an earlier pregnancy but the baby was born prematurely and died. Influencing the way her parents lived was their own backgrounds: they talked about how their parents had come with “nothing” and that growing up they had “nothing.” They had lived through the Depression and World War II. And both her parents lost relatives in the Holocaust.

In the complicated mixture of circumstance, culture and personality they behaved like many in their generation. They saved their money in bank accounts and were secretive about it, they held onto possessions far past their usefulness, they recited all kinds of bromides about health and wealth, and they (her father especially) were afraid of the world and its potential everyday calamities. They lived like there was a disaster waiting around the corner. To illustrate this propensity, and to highlight her own sense of its absurdity, Chast draws what she calls a Wheel of Doom with concentric circles that detail the everyday possible hazards of life from “choking due to laughter at a meal” to “gangrene – too tight wrist watch.”

What we have here is a story of America told through the tale of one family, exaggerated because it’s viewed through the lens of the comic cartoon. Graphic memoirs don’t lend themselves to wordy analysis on the part of the author, but rather to presentation. We get a glimpse of the immigrant generation. She says that although her mother’s father had been an engineer in Russia, here in America his English held him back and he could barely make a living. His wife worked as a presser in the garment district and cleaned people’s houses. The next generation, Roz Chast’s parents, climbed up the ladder of success. They were college graduates and became school teachers, and they raised their daughter in a rented apartment in Brooklyn. As far as they were concerned, they had made it. But their daughter knew that there was a world outside of Brooklyn. Eventually she moved to Connecticut with her own growing family so they could have more trees and grass, more space, and better schools.

This background sets up the bulk of the memoir which deals with her parents’ inevitable aging – their desire to be independent, the author’s guilt and worry about their still living in their apartment in Brooklyn into their early 90’s, and the author’s commitment to secure their future.

Is this a particularly Jewish story? It’s an interesting question. They certainly were not religiously observant. However there is a case to be made that to some extent they enacted a culturally Jewish legacy. They were educated and ambitious for their daughter. Chast states that her father was a high school language teacher of French and Spanish and could speak Yiddish, and there’s an occasional use of a Yiddish phrase. At one point she quotes her mother as having used the phrase “Oy Gevalt” (woe is me), a phrase that points back to their inheritance: the anxiety and anguish based on the lives of earlier generations. Roz Chast, born in 1954, can’t identify with the Jewish immigrant source of their anxiety. She found her parents clinging to their old thought patterns and behavior exasperating. But at the same time she knew they couldn’t help themselves – it was part of who they were - and she did the best she could to make their final years safe and endurable.

To watch a Youtube video of Roz Chast reading from Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant, click here.
To read an entry from the Jewish Virtual Library on the Jewish American family, click here.

People
George and Elizabeth Chast
Roz Chast - daughter of George and Elizabeth; author

Monday, August 3, 2015

"...[Sinclair] tells the story of her grandfather’s life thematically, reassembling it from several vantage points. And in telling that tale she also recounts her own discovery of a part of her heritage she previously had chosen to ignore." from a review by Judy Bolton-Fasman in the Boston Globe 10/11/14
Anne Sinclair’s maternal grandfather, Paul Rosenberg, was a major Parisian art dealer before and after World War II. Like other Jewish owners of objects of value, his art work was both “officially” confiscated by the Nazis as well as looted. Many of the artists Rosenberg represented were creators of what Hitler called "degenerate art." Sinclair writes this memoir to explain who her grandfather was, what happened to the art he owned during the war, and how he and other family members went about trying to retrieve it.

Sinclair understands the delicate nature of her undertaking, She makes the important point that what happened to her family pales in comparison to what happened to others who lost their lives. Her well-connected, large extended family managed to get passports and visas out of the country. Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art in New York sponsored Paul Rosenberg’s immigration to the U.S. Rosenberg fled with his family through Spain to Portugal, to New York City where he established another art gallery.

Much of this memoir has to do with Rosenberg’s relationships to the artists he nurtured and promoted– most prominently Picasso. The author explains how he worked with his artists, often buying paintings outright so that the artists had more or less steady income. When the family felt they needed to leave France, he hid his art in safe deposit boxes and in homes in the countryside where he had been living before they fled. He had already sent some art to England and to the U.S. for safe-keeping.

The story Sinclair tells about finding and retrieving the art after the war is sadly familiar. Much of it on the continent was gone. Investigations revealed that many businessmen collaborated with the Nazis and many of them went unpunished. Stolen art changed hands, landed in private collections and museums and no one seemed to care. After much inquiring and searching on the family’s part they retrieved all but about 60 of 400 paintings, many of which the family has since donated to museums. Sinclair is particularly fond of a work painted by Picasso in 1918 of her grandmother with her mother sitting on her lap which now hangs at the Musee Picasso in France.

Family
Author’s mother/s family
Alexandre Rosenberg – married Mathilde Jellinek
Paul Rosenberg – son of Alexandre and Mathilde; married Marguerite Loevi
Micheline Rosenberg – daughter of Paul and Marguerite; married Robert Schwartz (Sinclair)
Anne Rosenberg – daughter of Micheline and Robert
Alexandre Rosenberg – son of Paul and Marguerite; married Elaine
Elisabeth and Marianne Rosenberg – daughters of Alexandre and Elaine
Leonce Rosenberg – son of Alexandre and Mathilde
Lucienne Rosenberg – daughter of Leonce

To read an article in the New York Times about the Post War effort to retrieve the art, click here.
To read an article about an on-going saga about an art collection left after the war in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, click here.

Monday, July 6, 2015

"Every act of preservation, Kurtz observes, is only temporary, 'a brief swirl in the relentless flow of dissolution.' Eventually, everything and everyone gets lost. Jewish Nasielsk is a town that exists only in memory and those memories — of stonecutters and storytellers, mischievous school boys, a little girl with a red ribbon in her hair — are fading. In the pages of Glenn Kurtz's marvelous book, the ghosts from those three minutes are breathtakingly brought to life." from a review by Louise Steinman in the Los Angles Times 11/20/14.

Tucked away in his parents’ house in Florida was a three minute home movie taken by the author’s grandfather, David Kurtz, of a return trip to his birthplace in 1938 to the shtetl Nasielsk in Poland nearWarsaw. The author, who states that he never had had much interest in exploring his Jewish identity, was fascinated at this glimpse of a Jewish population connected to his family. Because just almost all of them were killed during Nazi roundups, he felt compelled to learn as much as he could about where the film was exactly shot and who the people in the film were.

What ensued was a journey that took a number of years and involved travel to cities and towns in the United States, Europe and Israel to retrieve information and interview survivors who were still alive and members of their families. One of his great pleasures was showing the film to survivors who became excited when they could identify their younger selves or one of their parents or a sibling or a neighbor or a friend or town merchant. The film triggered memories of their childhood and relationships that they thought they had forgotten. At least one survivor said that the film gave him back his childhood.

Glenn Kurtz was able to put together many pieces of the puzzle by following up on leads provided by survivors, by searching in archives, and by interviewing historians, archivists, and Jewish scholars as well as survivors. It is fascinating to see how piecing together a constellation of clues often prompted major discoveries – a positive identification, a relationship, a photo found in an official file or in an album owned by a survivor or relative. The longer Kurtz worked on deciphering the puzzles presented by the film, the more expertise he acquired, which led him to rephrase his questions, which often led him back to information in a source he’d previously researched but whose details he now realized were significant.

Throughout, Kurtz provides a broader historical context for what happened in the town and to the members of the town. Through both personal stories and historical documentation he manages to give life to a community that on film is very much alive. They had little idea of what was to come.

This memoir includes photos, and notes listing many institutions and resources.

To read or listen to an interview with the author that had been broadcast on National Public Radio, to read an excerpt from the memoir, and to watch the three minutes in Poland film clip, click here.

To watch a video of the author talking about his project to identify people in his grandfather's home movie, click here.

Family
(Hermann) Hyman Kurtz – married Leah Diamond (Diamont)
David Kurtz – son of Hyman and Lea; married Lena (Liza) Saltzman
Jerry Kurtz – son of David and Lena
Shirley Kurtz – daughter of David and Lena; married Jack Mandel
Milton Kurtz – son of David and Lena; married Dede
Roger Kurtz – son of Milton and Dede; married to Cynthia
David Kurtz – son of Roger and Cynthia
Dana Kurtz – daughter of Milton and Dede; married to Rob
Glenn Kurtz – son of Milton and Dede; author
William Kurtz – son of Hyman and Leah
Harry Kurtz – son of Hyman and Leah

Jankiel and Chana Glodek
Abraham Glodek – son of Jankiel and Chana
Leibl Glodek – son of Jankiel and Chana
Herszek Glodek – son of Jankiel and Chana
Szlamek Glodek – son of Jankiel and Chana
Gittla Glodek – daughter of Jankiel and Chana
Leslie (Lejzor) Glodek – married Celia
Jennifer Glodek – daughter of Leslie and Celia; married Jonathan Benn
Graham Glodek – son of Leslie and Celia; married Maria

Monday, June 1, 2015

"The book weaves together the historical with the intensely personal, redefining what counts as appropriate archival material and elevating intimate aspects from Valy’s life, and Wildman’s own, to new importance." from a review in the Times of Israel written by Batya Unger-Sargon 11/7/14

After the author Sarah Wildman’s grandparents died, much to her surprise she found a cache of letters, including photos, mostly passionate letters written by a young woman, Valerie Scheftel to her grandfather. In 1938 her 26-year-old grandfather had left her behind in Vienna six months after the Anschluss, when he left for America with his mother, sister, brother-in-law and nephew. This engaging and suspenseful memoir narrates the author’s attempts to unravel the story behind the letters that stop at the end of 1941 when America entered the war.

What struck Sarah Wildman in particular as she read the letters was that although she had felt close to her grandfather, she knew little or nothing about his life in Europe. A doctor who graduated from the University of Vienna Medical School just before Jews were forbidden to attend, he appeared to be happy. He was constantly upbeat. Now, reading Valy’s letters and others from family members left behind who begged him for official papers and money in order to flee increasingly dangerous circumstances, she had to rethink her assumptions. She wanted a better understanding of what had happened and she wanted to find out who Valerie Scheftel was.

The author, a practicing journalist, spent years visiting cities and towns in Europe retracing Valy’s steps, all the time consulting with Holocaust scholars at academic institutions and archives in Europe and in the United States. She was in the first contingent to visit the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen in Germany once it opened to the public. Her extensive research required time commitments, financial resources and persistence, and the reader looks over her shoulder as she finds documents and listens to conversations she has with experts and with a few family members still alive.

One of the strengths of this memoir is that the author contextualizes the lives of her grandfather and Valy and others caught in Europe in the 1930’s by describing geography, the constantly changing living conditions, the constantly added restrictions that led to the increasing strangulation of Jewish life, the establishment of the ghettos, the roundups, the camps.

In the process of doing the research and writing the book she gives birth to two children. She realizes that she is the last generation to have a direct connection to survivors. For her daughters the Holocaust will be a more distanced historical event. Sarah Wildman's connection to this story is immediate and visceral.

Monday, May 4, 2015

"It is Mr. Stille’s determination to use his skills as a reporter to flesh out his family’s history that lends this book its depth of field and emotional ballast." from a review by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times 3/21/2013

Alexander Stille’s intention in this interesting memoir is to explore how geography, history and culture shaped each of his parents individually and how their different backgrounds contributed to their volatile marriage and to his upbringing. The author, a journalist, is the son of Mikhail (Misha) Kamenetzki, also a journalist, whose family had fled Russia in the wake of the Russian Revolution and settled in Italy, only to have to flee from Italy to the United States as Europe became immersed in World War II. Mikhail Kamenetzki took the name Ugo Stille, shared with a journalist friend, so he could continue as a journalist in Italy when Mussolini was in power. When he finally got to New York he kept the pen name and continued as a journalist, working as a foreign correspondent reporting to Italy from the U.S.

Among the most vivid scenes in the memoir are those that take place in Italy. The author uses his skills as a journalist to recreate the historical moment and his family’s precarious position – his grandfather used every means possible to find their way out and get to America. Like many other Jews, he sensed doom if he didn’t try everything. But unlike many, he was successful, partly because he had some resources, he was resourceful, persistent, and lucky. A distant relative in the United States never responded to his plea to sponsor them. But as luck and trial and error would have it, a total stranger whose name he plucked from a phone book agreed to sponsor them. It took two years, many days spent on line at the American Embassy, but eventually he was able to leave with his wife and two children.

After the author fills us in on the background of his Protestant mother and her family and her move to New York, he writes about how, unhappily married to her first husband, she finds herself at the same party as Misha Kamenetzki, one in honor of Truman Capote. In some ways it was an example of the adage “Opposites attract.” Most likely her American character as well as her good looks attracted him. Something of a rebel, she was perhaps attracted to his “otherness,” certainly to his worldliness and his ability to attract a following of literati and other intellectuals.

Through Stille’s chronicling of their marriage, old age and death he fleshes out their personalities. He also spends some time exploring his father’s ambivalent relationship to his Jewishness. His father had never told his wife that he was Jewish before they married and it seems he would have been just as happy to not reveal that fact at all. That being said, there are times when he acts and reacts to situations that acknowledge his Jewish roots.

That his father was quite an interesting character is quite clear. That he was shaped by “The Force of Things,” as expressed in the title, is a large part of why he was so interesting. That the author has been shaped by that history as well goes without saying.

To read an article about Italian Jews during World War II click here.
To read an obituary of Ugo Stille click here.

Monday, April 6, 2015

"Halivni's book is surprisingly rich and resonant . . ." from a review by Jonathan Kirsch in the Los Angeles Times 10/16/1996

David Weiss HaLivni has written a memoir in order to
tell the story of his life from a religious and spiritual perspective. Until he
and his family were deported to Auschwitz when he was a teenager, he spent his
early years from about the age of five with his grandparents in Sighet, Romania where his Hassidic maternal grandfather
was his mentor. The author was precocious indeed, and although he insists
his capacity to memorize was not unusual, as a very young learner he memorized
large tracts of the Talmud. He was his grandfather’s pride and joy, his
family’s pride and joy, as well as the community’s.

He relates later that his extensive Talmud learning
helped him in the various Concentration camps he was assigned to. He
impressed fellow inmates with how much he had learned and their reverence for
learning stirred a number of them to help him survive. This included at least one
Jewish kapo.

When HaLivni was liberated, he first went back to
Sighet where he found out that his family had all perished. He then spent some
time with a family friend in Budapest, then moved to a Displaced Person’s camp in
Germany. From there he was sent to New York with other orphaned children and
stayed in places where he refused to eat the food until others could prove it
was kosher. It was at this point that Jewish American religious scholars
encountered his vast learning.

HaLivni, who went on to teach at the Jewish
Theological Seminary and then Columbia University, writes about charting his
own course. Yeshiva scholars advised him against going to a secular college,
wanting him to devote all his time to Talmud, but HaLivni was interested in
the secular world as well as the religious, so he attended yeshiva and Brooklyn
College simultaneously.HaLivni devotes very important chapters to the
Holocaust, how he was affected by it, and how and why he still has faith in God
despite what he experienced and despite having lost his family. He also writes
about how certain beliefs by members of the general public concerning the Holocaust
disturb him. For example, he says it is not true that every survivor feels
guilt for having made it out alive.

This memoir leaves the reader with a lot to think
about. His exploration of his own life as a survivor (he tells little of his traumatic experiences as a concentration camp prisoner) reinforces the notion that survivors are not a monolithic group.
Their reactions are shaped by their upbringing, past experiences, circumstances,
and individual personalities.This memoir includes a detailed and useful glossary explaining religious terminology and well as describing who historical personages mentioned in the body of his work were.

To watch a video of a discussion between Elie Weisel (who grew up in Sighet) and Oprah Winfrey about Auschwitz and to see them at Auschwitz, click here.

Monday, March 2, 2015

"... [T]his is entirely attributable to Keilson's artistry, knowing the small details, having a sense of the house where Nico is being hidden, knowing the main characters well … all this makes the fear, anxiety and distress of the situation these 'normal' people find themselves in palpable." from a review in the Globe and Mail by Andre Alexis 9/3/2010

Hans Keilson, a German Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, has written a novella that draws on many of the experiences of his life: He fled to Amsterdam and hid, and he worked with the Resistance. This work gives readers an opportunity to immerse themselves in occupied Holland and to experience the occupation from the perspective of a Christian couple cooperating with the Resistance and from the perspective of a Jew in hiding.

In this novella, first published in the same year as Anne Frank’s diary, Keilson creates a young Christian couple who’ve agreed to take in a stranger – a single Jewish man in his 60’s. In the first chapter we learn that after many months the hidden Jew has died of natural causes. The rest of the novel is mostly made up of scenes from the past – from his being introduced to the couple, to his settling in, to the nervousness on everybody’s part.

Several chapters deal with the dilemma of how to get rid of the dead body without the couple being suspected of having housed a Jew or without their being caught red-handed with the body of a Jew. This focus reinforces in the novel an absurdist element created by a political reality that has the world turned upside down. Here a young couple have put their lives in jeopardy to extend hospitality to someone in need. The person who is in need has committed no vile act for which he is being hunted. His sole crime – he was born a Jew.

As we read, we become aware of the many potential problems that can and do arise – issues that the young couple had not thought to anticipate. How safe is it, for example, for the Jew they call Nico, to come downstairs? Can they trust anyone with their secret? Which family members? Any family members? What about venders who come regularly, like the milk man? What to do about the woman who comes to clean twice a week? Caution is intensified by fear. His being hidden in their home becomes a focus of their day-to-day lives. We can imagine this situation occurring all over this small country and wherever in Europe Christians offered to hide Jews.

The young couple starts off talking amongst themselves about the stranger’s being a Jew. It is clear that Jews are strangers. They are curious about what it means to be Jewish since the stranger explains that he’s given up Jewish ritual practice. But through the months of forced closeness they become connected and their common humanity transcends their difference. He had put his life in their hands. They mourn his death. They will be forever changed.

People
Hans Keilson (author)

Places
Holland

To read the obituary for Hans Keilson published in the New York Times, click here.
To read the obituary for a Dutch Christian who helped and hid many Jews, click here.

"[W]hen I was much younger . . . even then I would wonder what kind of present you could possibly have without knowing the stories of your past." Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

Welcome

My name is Toby Anne Bird and I've been interested in memoirs for many years. I teach courses on autobiographical writing in New York, and I'm an amateur genealogist. I've created this blog to call attention to the many compelling memoirs about Jewish people, their communities, their history and their culture.

Genealogy and history are more than facts and figures. Memoirs help bring those facts and figures to life because they are eye-witness accounts that immerse their readers in lives lived. These primary sources help you understand life on the ground, so to speak - a time period, a geographical location, and/or a particular set of circumstances.

The memoirs that I post on this blog are ones I've read and recommend. Each post consists of a short review of the contents and is followed by lists of family names and geographical locations of interest to those involved in Jewish genealogy. I will occasionally also be posting documentaries and fiction that can enrich a genealogical or historical perspective.

I hope that lots of you out in cyberspace will find this blog useful. I expect in the beginning to post three times a week - on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, one memoir per post. I welcome your feedback, suggestions, and questions. This blog went live on 3/1/2010.

Toby Anne Bird, Ph.DYou can leave comments on the blog or e-mail me at toby.bird@ncc.edu.

4/12/2010: I now have posted reviews on 30 books and documentaries. I will now be adding reviews twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays instead of three times a week.

7/19/10: I now have now posted reviews of more than 50 books and documentaries. I will now be adding reviews once a week on Mondays.

9/5/11: I now have posted reviews of more than 100 books and documentaries. I will now be adding reviews twice a month on the first and third Mondays.

5/31/14: I now have posted reviews of more than 170 books and documentaries. I will now be adding reviews once a month on the first Monday.

11/6/15: This blog will be on partial hiatus. If I read a memoir that I think should be added, I'll add it. It's been a five year run.

Search This Blog

Blog Table of Contents: Alphabetical List of Reviews Posted

Abramovich and Zilberg, Smuggled in Potato Sacks: Fifty stories of the Hidden Children of the Kaunas Ghetto

Aciman, Out of Egypt

Adorjan, An Exclusive Love

Alban, Anya's War

Antin, The Promised Land: The Autobiography of a Russian Immigrant

Appelfeld, My Life

Apple, I Love Gootie: My Grandmother's Story

Apple, Roomates: My Grandfather's Story

Auster, Invention of Solitude

Bauer (director), The Ritchie Boys (documentary film)

Beer's The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust

Behar, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba

Bendavid-Val, The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod

Benjamin, Last Days in Babylon: The History of a Familly, The Story of a Nation

Berg, Diary of Mary Berg: Growing up in the Warsaw ghetto

Berger, Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust

Bernstein H., The Dream

Bernstein H., The Invisible Wall

Bernstein, B. Family Matters: Sam, Jennie and the kids

Bernstein, S., The Seamstress: A Memoir of Survival

Berr, The Journal of Helene Berr

Bitton-Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing up in the Holocaust

Bloom, Out of a Doll's House

Brenner, The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt

Brittain and Spotton (writer/director) Memorandum (documentary film)

Buergenthal, A Lucky Child: A memoir of surviving Auschwitz as a young boy

Subscribe via email

Interesting Articles

My Blog List

Potentially Useful Books that are more Histories, than Memoirs - not reviewed.

Eliach, There Once Was a World: A 900-year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok, 1998. A National Book Award Finalist that recreates and documents the author's hometown shtetl in Lithuania that is the basis for the permanent exhibit called the "Tower of Life" at the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

Evans, The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South, 1973. A classic study of its subject, only intermittently autobiographical. The author grew up in Durham, North Carolina.

Margoshes, A World Apart: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Nineteenth Century Galicia, published in Yiddish in 1936; published in English in 2008. A very useful book written in a lively manner about life in Galicia which includes discussions of the Hassidic dynasties and other rabbinic authorities and their rivalries, the world of work beyond the realm of the synagogue, and the day to day life of the author's family.

Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelbaum, 1958. A day by day documenting of life and death in the Warsaw ghetto and what Ringelblum, a social historian and archivist of the ghetto, heard about the war outside the ghetto.